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Ruby Conf Australia 2013 in Review - Boxen by Github

Robert–Tuesday, 26 February 2013

Ruby Conf Australia 2013 has come and gone and what a ride it was! Awesome talks, great attendees, and the organisers were incredible. The variety of topics being presented had to be one of the most impressive features of the first Australian conference.

Out of all the talks, the one I got the most out of had to be “The Setup: Managing an Army of Laptops with Puppet” by Will Farrington (@wfarr) from Github. Will’s talk concentrated on Github’s recently open sourced project Boxen and how they use it to provision new employee machines. This resonated strongly with me as recently I’ve been experimenting with Puppet to automatically configure Vagrant VMs to speed up the process of getting new developers ready to work on our projects. Boxen is another addition to the tools we can use to automate and speed up the repetitive task of getting new employees up and ready to commit ASAP.

The best place to start learning about Boxen is from the Github’s own project announcement blog post and their project homepage. There’s also some additional Github authored documents introducing and helping to explain the technologies used in the project. Looking at the repository for the project there’s already an impressive amount of activity from the community with already a large number of puppet modules and pull requests.

It was an impressive talk from a very knowledgeable professional in our industry and as NetEngine grows I look forward to working with and contributing back to technologies like Boxen to improve, automate, and streamline the setup of our development environments.